The exact new moon/solar eclipse at 28.52 Leo occurs on Monday, August 21st at 2:30 PM EST.

The sun was going, and the world was wrong. The grasses were wrong; they were platinum. Their every detail of stem, head, and blade shone lightless and artificially distinct as an art photographer’s platinum print. This color has never been seen on earth. The hues were metallic; their finish was matte. The hillside was a nineteenth-century tinted photograph from which the tints had faded. All the people you see in the photograph, distinct and detailed as their faces look, are now dead. The sky was navy blue. My hands were silver. All the distant hills’ grasses were finespun metal which the wind laid down. I was watching a faded color print of a movie filmed in the Middle Ages. I missed my own century, the people I knew, and the real light of day.

— Annie Dillard, "Total Eclipse"

The world was wrong. I missed my own century, the people I knew, and the real light of day. Annie Dillard's words struck a chord yesterday when I was reading her famous essay. In the past week, it has felt like the world is sliding backwards, into a Medieval darkness. It may only feel that way because I'm white. That we live in a white supremacist nation isn't news to me. The evidence of white supremacists living in America isn't news to me. It's never been news to people of color. Trump is the symptom, not the disease. The KKK has been here all along.

This particular eclipse is astrologically significant, for America and for Donald Trump. Collectively, we are being plunged into darkness, and we must ask ourselves how we can find our way back to the light. You don’t have to be an astrologer to understand how clearly the timing of this natural metaphor coincides with our politics at the moment. On Monday, a shadow falls across the land. You have seen it coming.

Before we drag our nation’s shadows into the full, bright sunshine where they cannot hide, we must acknowledge that they are part of us. If we deny our shadows, if we say we are only light and the darkness is not in us, the darkness does not go away; it only grows more dangerous. In Jungian psychoanalysis, the shadow self has to be acknowledged and integrated so that the self can be whole. We’ve been given a call to do this collectively, as a nation, and specifically white people. All white people benefit from white privilege. Dismantling the white supremacist system is our work to do.

At the lunar eclipse in Aquarius two weeks ago, I spoke of crisis as both calamity and decision point. That full moon saw my husband and me at a house party where he played a cover of "Don't Dream It's Over" by Crowded House. With that song he created a moment of almost embarrassing sincerity, an emotional sing-along in a Bushwick basement full of twenty-somethings. They come, they come/To build a wall between us/We know they won't win. The past two years have been dark and exhausting. I recommend occasionally coping with '80s ballads.

Aquarius is about the vision. At the lunar eclipse, I urged you to remember the vision, the potential and dreams of society. I was speaking about eclipses on a personal level then, but with the solar eclipse I feel it's necessary to address what this means for us collectively. We are in the midst of a crisis. As a nation, we must make a decision, not about who we are--because the truth hurts, but this is who we are right now--but about who we are going to be, which direction we are heading in.

The solar eclipse happens in direct opposition to the Aquarius moon of the United States' chart. That Aquarius moon is our collective dream of a society that hasn't yet been realized, a more perfect Union. That Aquarius moon represents the best parts of our favorite fiction: the American Dream. The moon in a collective sense often represents the public, and so it is in the USA's chart. We love our Aquarians -- Oprah, Ellen DeGeneres, Abraham Lincoln, and Rosa Parks -- for standing out and creating social change. We love our inventors, our zany ideas, our space explorers, our rugged individualists, our breathless hurtle towards the future, consequences be damned. That's America. And that dream of America is about to face a total eclipse.

The crisis of an eclipse, as I mentioned before, is most likely to occur if it closely aspects planets or points of the chart in question.

This eclipse is also conjunct Donald Trump's ascendant exactly, and his Mars by two degrees. The conjunction is the most powerful aspect in astrology, representing the total fusion or collision of two energies. And the ascendant is a very sensitive point. I was at a talk given by astrologer Monty Taylor last month. He told us that when an eclipse fell on his ascendant recently, he had a heart attack. I can't make the same exact prediction for Trump or anyone else, as astrology is a language of archetypes that can manifest themselves in many different ways. But since Leo is the sign that rules the heart, I am thinking of Donald Trump's heart. Or rather, the lack of it.

We often have to question the intentions behind the things Trump says -- did he mean that? Did he know what he was saying? Is he mentally ill? Is he actually fully aware of the connections between rhetoric, propaganda, and power? Is he intentionally misdirecting us? Probably, the answer to all questions is yes. With this particular set of remarks, we can't dismiss POTUS as unaware. He has always supported the KKK, and he benefits directly by doing that.

In the recent words of the National Women's Liberation, "White supremacists, especially those who speak with torches, nooses and guns, are calling for the subordination and extermination of people of color and Jewish people. Ignoring them will not make them go away. They threaten the lives of people of color and Jewish people, and make white people think that the source of their pain is people of different races, when in fact it's the billionaire class that exploits whites and people of color alike, and blocks us all from getting the things we need."

Trump is a white supremacist who has allied himself with other white supremacists, including David Duke and Steve Bannon, and refuses to denounce white supremacy with any sincerity or consistency. He is also a member of the billionaire class who wishes to exploit the 99% in service to himself. He benefits directly by "making white people think that the source of their pain is people of different races, when in fact it's the billionaire class." He has used racist rhetoric deliberately to do just this. On Monday, he will be eclipsed. This is a moment where he could fall. This is a decision we should have made long before he was ever elected. Sometimes it takes a crisis to bring us to the brink, to realize what we're really made of.